Reports are circulating on the Web about a project called "Operation Open Gates," which is a consortium to be announced on January 25th by the Open Source Development labs (OSDL). As first reported on LinuxBusinessWeek last Friday, OSDL, IBM and Intel are to purportedly "rewrite the components in the Linux kernel that, it has been alleged, tread on other people's IP - or at least the 27 Microsoft patents that Linux supposedly infringes.

Australian Andrew Tridgell has been appointed a Fellow at Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a move which will allow him to continue leading global development on the open-source Samba project.According to a statement from OSDL -- a non-profit organisation supported by a consortium of Linux customers and vendors, including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and NEC -- Tridgell becomes the second appointed OSDL Fellow, after Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) has formed a Japanese group to improve Linux's ability to handle languages that have many more characters than the Roman alphabet. Hitachi, Fujitsu, Miracle Linux, Mitsubishi, NEC, Toshiba, IBM and Intel will work on improving support for the larger character sets as well as other requirements for Linux in Japan, OSDL said Tuesday.